Mistral's Kiss

CHAPTER 2

I WOKE SURROUNDED BY A CIRCLE OF FACES, IN A BED THAT WAS not mine. Faces the color of darkest night, whitest snow, the pale green of new leaves, the gold of summer sunshine, the brown of leaves trodden underfoot destined to be rich earth. But there was no pale skin that held all the colors of a brilliant crystal, like a diamond carved into flesh. I blinked up at all of them, and wondered — remembering my dream — where were the cookies?

Doyle’s voice, deep and thick, as if it came from a great distance, said, “Princess Meredith, are you well?”

I sat up, nude in the bed with black silk sheets, cold against my skin. The queen had loaned us her room for the night. Real fur, soft and nearly alive, pressed against my hip. The fur covering moved, and Kitto’s face blinked up at me. His huge blue eyes dominated his pale face and held no white in all that color. The color was Seelie sidhe, but the eyes themselves were goblin. He had been a child of the last great goblin — sidhe war. His pale perfect body was barely four feet tall, a delicate man, the only one of my men who was shorter than I was. He looked child-like cuddled down in the fur, his face framed like some cherub for a Valentine’s Day card. He had been more than a thousand years old before Christianity was a word. He’d been part of my treaty with the goblins. They were my allies because he shared my bed.

His hand found my arm and stroked up and down my skin, seeking comfort as we all did when we were nervous. He didn’t like me staring at him without saying anything. He had been curled up close to me, and the power of the Goddess and the God in my dream must have slipped across his skin. The faces of the fifteen men standing in their circle around the bed showed clearly that they had felt something, too.

Doyle repeated his question: “Princess Meredith, are you well?”

I looked at my captain of the guard, my lover, his face as black as the cloak I had worn in vision, or the fur of the boar that had run out into the snow and brought spring back to the land. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, trying to break free of the last vestiges of vision and dream. Trying to be in the here and now.

I raised my hands from the tangle of sheets. In my right hand was a cup formed of horn, the horn ancient and yellowed, held in gold that bore symbols that few outside faerie could read now. In my left hand I expected to find the white knife, but it was not there. My left hand was empty. I stared at it for a moment, then raised the cup with both hands.

“My God,” Rhys whispered, though the whisper was strangely loud.

“Yes,” Doyle said, “that is exactly what it is.”

“What did he say when he gave you the cup of horn?” It was Abe who asked. Abe with his hair striped in shades of pale grey, dark grey, black, and white, perfect strands of color. His eyes were a few shades darker grey than most human eyes, but not otherworldly, not really. If you dressed him like a modern Goth, he’d be the hit of any club scene.

His eyes were strangely solemn. He’d been the drunk and joke of the court for more years than I could remember. But now there was a different person looking out from his face, a glimpse of what he might once have been. Someone who thought before he spoke, someone who had other preoccupations than getting drunk as quickly and as often as he could.

Abe swallowed hard and asked again, “What did he say?”

I answered him this time. “Drink and be merry.”

Abe smiled, wistful, sorrow-filled. “That sounds like him.”

“Like who?” I asked.

“The cup used to be mine. My symbol.”

I crawled to the edge of the bed and knelt on it. I held the cup up with both hands toward him. “Drink and be merry, Abeloec.”

He shook his head. “I do not deserve the God’s favor, Princess. I do not deserve anyone’s favor.”

I suddenly knew — not by way of a vision — I just suddenly possessed the knowledge. “You weren’t thrown out of the Seelie Court for seducing the wrong woman, as everyone believes. You were thrown out because you lost your powers, and once you could no longer make the courtiers merry with drink and revelry, Taranis kicked you out of the golden court.”

A tear trembled on the edge of one eye. Abeloec stood there, straight and proud in a way that I had never seen him. I’d never seen him sober, as he appeared to be now. Clearly he’d drunk to forget, but he was still immortal and sidhe, which meant that no drug, no drink, could ever truly help him find oblivion. He could be clouded, but never truly know the rush of any drug.

He finally nodded, and that was enough to spill the tear onto his cheek. I caught the tear on the edge of the horn cup. That tiny drop seemed to race down the inside of the cup faster than gravity should pull it. I don’t know if the others could see what was happening, but Abe and I watched the tear race for the bottom of that cup. The tear slid inside the dark curve of the bottom, and suddenly there was liquid spilling up, bubbling up like a spring from the dark i

Deep gold liquid filled the cup to its brim, and the smell of honey and berries and the pungent smell of alcohol filled the room.

Abe’s hands cupped over mine in the same way I had held the cup in the vision with the God. I raised it up, and as Abeloec’s lips touched the rim, I said, “Drink and be merry. Drink and be mine.”

He hesitated before he drank, and I observed an intelligence in those grey eyes that I’d never glimpsed before. He spoke with his lips brushing the edge of the cup. He wanted to drink. I could feel it in the eager tremble in his hands as they covered mine.

“I belonged to a king once. When I was no longer his court fool, he cast me out.” The trembling in his hands slowed, as if each word steadied him. “I belonged to a queen once. She hated me, always, and made certain by her words and her deeds that I knew just how much she hated me.” His hands were warm and firm against mine. His eyes were deep, dark grey, charcoal grey, with a hint of black somewhere in the center. “I have never belonged to a princess, but I fear you. I fear what you will do to me. What you will make me do to others. I fear taking this drink and binding myself to your fate.”

I shook my head but never lost the concentration of his eyes. “I do not bind you to my fate, Abeloec, nor me to yours. I merely say, drink of the power that was once yours to wield. Be what you once were. This is not my gift to give to you. This cup belongs to the God, the Consort. He gave it to me and bid me share it with you.”

“He spoke of me?”

“No, not you specifically, but he bid me to share it with others. The Goddess told me to give you all something else to eat.” I frowned, unsure how to explain everything I’d seen, or done. Vision is always more sensible inside your head than on your tongue.

I tried to put into words what I felt in my heart. “The first drink is yours, but not the last. Drink, and we will see what happens.”

“I am afraid,” he whispered.

“Be afraid, but take your drink, Abeloec.”

“You do not think less of me for being afraid.”

“Only those who have never known fear are allowed to think less of others for being afraid. Frankly, I think anyone who has never been afraid of anything in their entire life is either a liar or lacks imagination.”

It made him smile, then laugh, and in that laughter I heard the echo of the God. Some piece of Abeloec’s old godhead had kept this cup safe for centuries. Some shadow of his old power had waited and kept watch. Watched for someone who could find their way through vision to a hill on the edge of winter and spring; on the edge of darkness and dawn; a place between, where mortal and immortal could touch.

His laughter made me smile, and there were answering chuckles from around the room. It was the kind of laughter that would be infectious. He would laugh and you would have to laugh with him.

“Just by holding the cup in your hand,” Rhys said, “your laughter makes me smile. You haven’t been that amusing in centuries.” He turned his boyishly handsome face to us, with its scars where his other tricolored blue eye would have been. “Drink, and see what is left of who you thought you were, or don’t drink, and go back to being shadow and a joke.”

“A bad joke,” Abeloec said.

Rhys nodded and came to stand close to us. His white curls fell to his waist, framing a body that was the most seriously muscled of any of the guards. He was also the shortest of them, a full-blooded sidhe who was only five foot six — unheard of. “What do you have to lose?”

“I would have to try again. I would have to care again,” said Abe. He stared at Rhys as completely as he had at me, as if what we were saying meant everything.

“If all you want is to crawl back into another bottle or another bag of powder, then do it. Step away from the cup and let someone else drink,” Rhys said.

A look of pain crossed Abeloec’s face. “It’s mine. It’s part of who I was.”

“The God didn’t mention you by name, Abe,” Rhys said. “He told her to share, not who with.”

“But it’s mine.”

“Only if you take it,” Rhys said, and his voice was low and clear, and somehow gentle, as if he understood more than I did why Abe was afraid.

“It’s mine,” Abe said again.

“Then drink,” Rhys said, “drink and be merry.”

“Drink and be damned,” Abeloec said.

Rhys touched his arm. “No, Abe, say it, and do your best to believe it. Drink and be merry. I’ve seen more of us come back into our power than you have. The attitude affects it, or can.”

Abeloec started to let go of the cup, but I moved off the bed and came to stand in front of him. “You will bring everything you learned in this long sad time with you, but you will still be you. You will be who you were, just older and wiser. Wisdom bought at great cost is nothing to regret.”

He stared down at me with his eyes a dark and perfect grey. “You bid me drink.”

I shook my head. “No. It must be your choice.”

“You will not command me?”

I shook my head again.

“The princess has some very American views on freewill,” Rhys said.

“I take that as a compliment,” I said.

“But…,” Abe said, softly.

“Yes,” Rhys said, “it means it’s all on you. Your choice. Your fate. All in your hands. Enough rope to hang yourself, as they say.”

“Or save yourself,” Doyle said, and he came to stand on the other side, like a taller darkness to Rhys’s white. Abeloec and I stood with white on one side, black on the other. Rhys had once been Cromm Cruach, a god of death and life. Doyle was the queen’s chief assassin, but once he had been Nodons, a god of healing. We stood between them, and when I looked up at Abeloec something moved in his eyes, some shadow of that person I had glimpsed on the hill inside the hood of a cloak.